One of the side effects of Unity being a favoured development engine – particularly on mobiles – is that any changes to its structure can have a huge impact on the scores of studios worldwide that rely on it.

According to Unity Technologies, the latest version of the engine – Unity 4 – represents a 'complete overhaul' of all that has come before.

It sports a new character animation tool, dubbed Mecanim, that the company claims will revolutionise what's achievable for even the smallest of studios, as well as support for Flash and – in preview form at least – Linux.

But, despite all that's new, CEO David Helgason told us the engine's aim to open up quality game development to all hasn't changed. We caught up with David for his take on just what Unity 4 will offer loyal developers and newcomers alike.

Pocket Gamer: What were you looking to achieve with the upgrades in in Unity 4?

David Helgason: You've likely heard it from us before, but it's worth repeating that the idea behind Unity is to democratise game development by providing a powerful engine and highly intuitive and efficient tools at a cost that's not going to break the back of smaller developers.

Is the focus on making Unity 4 the perfect tool for AAA releases an attempt to move in on Unreal's territory?

Obviously we have been gaining adoption by customers who've previously using Unreal and Crytek - and equally often in-house engines - but we don't get up in the morning to 'invade' or 'attack' someone.

Making Unity 4 an amazing tool for AAA game development is all about making sure that our developers have the tools necessary to make their games and making those tools as polished as possible.

With Unity 4 we will get these tools into more hands so we see better and better games across all platforms, and our singular goal at Unity remains to make an awesome tool for all developers, whether they have a huge team or no team at all.

Many commentators argue Flash gaming is in decline with HTML5 coming to the fore. Do you think many developers will use the Flash Player add on?

We've had an extreme amount of interest from developers about using the Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on.

Flash is installed on over a billion PCs worldwide and holds a ton of potential for developers using Unity. For one Flash runs on more PCs than where HTML5 and WebGL are supported.

While we're planning to stay around for the very long term, we absolutely act in the short term. This year and the next is when our customers problems need to be solved.

You see, if Flash should end up declining as many predict, it's won't disappear in a puff of smoke, it will be a strong profitable platform this year and the next.

Is Mecanim being billed as Unity 4's 'killer' new feature?

Mecanim a new type of technology and it's exciting, not only for us, but for the Unity community.

Unity will enable workflows and gameplay that most teams just wouldn't be able to create. This is a pretty huge and valuable add on for all of the developers that are looking to get realistic character animation into their games.

I think we're going to see a lot of really amazingly well animated games come out thanks to this.

However I would argue that Unity's killer app lies elsewhere – not in any dazzling feature, but in how the features fit together to create a stunningly polished development experience, saving pain and time and money, and how Unity then helps teams bring their work to their most important platforms, at ultra low cost and with incredibly little manual QA time.

Unity has mentioned before there's a possibility of supporting Windows Phone when WP8 launches. Is this still the case?

As we've said in the past, we're always evaluating every platform we can to see how it will benefit the developers that are using Unity.

Other than that we don't have any specific announcements currently.
Thanks to David for his time. You can pre-order Unity 4 from the firm's website.